On Thursday Federation House, the building that is our new home, officially launches.

Come down and see how Castlefield Gallery's New Art Spaces programme is allowing us and many other Manchester artist's groups the opportunity to create new creative spaces in the city, making use of the incredible historic buildings of the Co-operative as they move into their new home Noma.

We'll be showing photography and film of our recent projects as well as being around to talk about current projects Northern Lights, Collaborative Compositions and our Residency in our open studio on the Upper Ground Floor with loads more happening throughout the building courtesy of our fellow Federation housemates.

We're always interested in meeting anyone interested or keen to get involved in what we do so please head down. We may even be dishing out some Icelandic goodies.

It’s the week leading up to Reykjavik Winter Light festival taking place from the 6th to the 15th of February in the Icelandic capital. Curated Place and Visit Reykjavik, with the support of Nordic Culture Point, have developed five major new installations for exhibition at the festival bringing together artists from Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, Canada, Norway and the UK. The stunning light installations will take place across the whole city centre along with a packed events programme. We're in the final stages of turning Reykjavik city central into a glowing masterpiece and we'll try to find time to share insights about each artwork, the idea behind each, and the artists involved over the next few days.

First up: Waking the City Statues by Krisján Gunnar Kristjánsson

Icelander Kristján Gunnar Krisjánsson, a lighting designer and guerrilla lighting aficionado, is working with Örvar Halldórsson to transform the sculpture garden behind Einar Jónsson’s Art Museum into a mystical place.

Bringing together a team that delivers skills across music, animation, motion graphics and of course lighting design, Kristján and his team will use projectors with multimedia video to bring three of the main statues to life - seeing them move, exhibit emotions and and even change facial expressions. Projections onto the museum's wall, smoke machines and field recordings of city sounds will transport the audience to a magical world with the aim to leave them in a dream-like state. Albeit not necessarily a peaceful one.

The sculpture garden was formally opened in June 1984 displaying 26 bronze casts of Einar Jónsson's work. Known for exploring themes of deep Cosmic spirituality like the eternal, infinite body and consciousness of the universe, and for an obsession with Icelandic Mythology, Jonsson's muse populated his world with Gods, Demons, Elfs and the "Huldufolk" hidden people - Vættir, Jötnar, angels and trolls. Now regarded as something of a quiet formal art space in the city the garden had a dramatically different effect on a young Kristján leading him to his choice of location for his installation "I want to give the people of Reykjavik an understanding of how I felt when encountering these works as a child" he explained "they gave me nightmares".

Curated Place and Reykjavik Winter Light Festival announce the winners of three international commissions for new light-based artworks.

After long deliberation Reykjavik Winter Light festival and Curated Place are extremely pleased to announce the three projects that they will be commissioning and producing for the 2014 festival.

More than 50 entries were received for this year’s commissions all of which were presented to the Winter Light Festival board last week for consideration. The exceptionally high quality of proposals led to some extremely difficult decisions having to be made and a close fought race to find the successful projects. We wanted them all…but sadly we could only have three.

Nevertheless, after long deliberation we’re extremely pleased to announce that the three successful projects bring together artists from Iceland, Norway, Greenland, Canada and the UK.

Circle 6 is a Spiritual Light Installation by the multi-national team of Inuk Silis Høegh (Greenland/Denmark), Arild M. Kalseth (Norway), and Amelie Deschamps (France/Canada). Circle 6 is a three dimensional experimental light installation built around the concept and practice of a healing circle - a healing machine embracing the energy and aura of light.

Høegh's ambition of scale and presence was recently boldly demonstrated when he transformed the Great Hall at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottowa into "Iluliaq" a monumental Iceberg (the timelapse below from their site):

Reykjavik based British Artist Kitty Von-Sometime, creator of The Weird Girls Project, will draw inspiration from the magic of bioluminescence to create an epic and immersive environment of reactive jellyfish to take over the city streets.

Finally Icelandic lighting designer and guerrilla lighting aficionado Kristján Gunnar Kristjánsson will work with Örvar Halldórsson bringing together their skills of lighting design and motion graphics wizardry to Wake the City Statues across each festival.

Development starts immediately and everyone is fired up to turn Reykjavik into a glowing masterpiece this February - with more artworks to be announced for the festival shortly.

To stay up to date with more commissions and other artists opportunities sign up to our Newsletter, our Facebook and Twitter feeds.

With local authorities, governments and commercial sponsors everywhere questioning the value of culture and cutting budgets around those of us that make it we've seen some good press today. The Manchester Evening News are reporting that over the summer Manchester retailers in the city have experienced a healthy 7.2% growth over the summer months on last year, stating:

A strong events calendar, which included the Manchester Day Parade in June, the Manchester International Festival in July and Dig The City and Manchester Pride in August, are all believed to have contributed to the rise in footfall in the city and ultimately increased basket spend.

The immediate economic impact of arts isn't always easy to quantify (the social impact even harder) and its a task normally left to established voices in the sector to make, so it's good to see a mainstream press outlet directly recognising the crucial importance of a thriving cultural sector on the well-being of the more commercially driven city.

We're proud of the fact that by working with CityCo we were able to both satisfy their remit to improve the city centre for their members and the public while simultaneously bringing high quality monumental artwork to a public that may well never have seen it if tucked away inside a gallery. It's also nice that the paper used our sculptures with Jason Hackenwerth and the Heart of Manchester BID as their featured image.

I'm a huge fan of the Fablab concept and have done a few projects with the Manchester lab - personally and as part of festivals and large events. The potential of the equipment they have there for prototyping and realising design and artistic projects is huge, so I'm always on the lookout for ideas to test out with their kit.

With the whole culture around the labs being one of open-source and peer learning there's loads of stuff out there to get your hand dirty with trying things out for yourself but this work from Greg Petchkovsky pushes it to the next level. Takes a load of skill in 3d software by the looks of it but makes me think this could be a technique that takes work in the style of the Boyle Family's earth pieces out of the gallery and back into the real world.